Productivity has long been a goal for information workers and factory workers but now, with the emergence of so-called smart-homes, it has become more feasible to enable productivity and efficiency in the home. With an aging population, the dramatic increase in the size of homes, and the increased pressure on people's time, any technology focused on simplifying and decluttering the daily routines is desirable. While today's corporate productivity tools may manage tasks, contacts, and progress, there is no such system to augment productivity within the home. At the home, household tasks such as laundry, taking out the garbage, cleaning, etc. would benefit from systematic management (the user may also be in a hybrid context in which he is at home and also teleworking).
With respect to household efficiency, users may have a set of future and ongoing personal goals (household-based or otherwise) that their corporate productivity system cannot monitor. Examples of these might include: “Clean up the attic before the Holidays”, and “Take out the garbage”, “Write a chapter in my book”. Note that the user is a mobile entity within the home, walking and moving from room to room and floor to floor. Additionally, the user's household contains objects of importance to the user and/or that play a role in household tasks. Examples may include: the home deed, the users keys, the laundry hamper, the laundry machine, the furnace, the rooms of the house (e.g., kitchen), and so on. Not being able to locate these objects can be frustrating to many homeowners, impedes progress on tasks involving the items, and reduces overall productivity. Therefore, while corporate systems have inventory management there is no system that helps users track the dynamically changing location of household items and their interrelationships. Also, despite smart-home advancements, fine-grain sensing and exploitation of user activity has yet to be fully realized and there is no standard for expressing the semantics of houses and the activities taking place within them.
Today's typical smart home deployments do not generally attempt to be proactive, nor do they integrate with a broad range of user contexts and tasks. Smart-homes are usually comprised of a large number of kinds of sensors integrated into rooms and appliances. Touch, weight, motion, and light sensitive sensor technology make many useful monitoring use cases possible. The current art of smart homes has been shown to work in managing physiological user information vis a vis user movements and activities. Real-time anomaly detection (e.g., the elderly user is in the bathroom who has not moved in many minutes) has been shown to help discover and avert tragedies.
With respect to home inventory, a great number of thick-client (PC-based) applications are available that help the user digitize information about her personal objects. However, these systems are intended to be stand-alone and archival, not highly interactive and dynamic. For example, they are cumbersome to be used to track and archive the movement of objects from room to room on a minute by minute basis.
While process management and workflow (WF) system have existed for many years, the WF systems do not typically use knowledge models. Few to no WF systems exist with the aim of improving personal productivity in the context of a modern Western home. This may be the case because it is difficult for systems to accurately infer user location within large homes and to compute over the complex notions of time, space, and location within the context of specific kinds of household.